ABSTRACT
In a society where it is said that “law is what the courts do,” one notable feature of American justice is the practice of plea bargaining. As people think about the origins of law and social ordering, too often they downplay human agency and choose instead to highlight the nation-state and powers of coercion. With notable exceptions such as Friedman and Percival, McConville and Mirsky, and Steinberg, court efficiency, work group cooperation, the prosecutor, the police, trial complexity, and crowding in the courts still dominate much of the research on plea bargaining. Contours of plea bargaining are described by analyzing, and this is extremely important, guilty plea rates and attendant charge or sentencing concessions at 10-year intervals from 1830 to 1860. Guilty pleas, the first element of bargaining, began to be entered in significant numbers in common law-based cases during the late 1830s and, by the 1840s, were widely accepted for virtually every sort of offense.
